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adeelarshad82 writes "You often hear in the software industry that performance optimization is one of the last steps in the software development process. That bodes well for Windows 8, considering at the early stage of Developer Preview—even before we've seen an actual beta—the nascent operating system is getting widespread praise for its performance, particularly in startup times. Anecdotal evidence is always encouraging, but PCMag decided to run some very early tests on the OS to see if the reports were wishful thinking or if there was a real, measurable boost in speed. Along with startup and shutdown times, they used several standard industry benchmarks to compare Windows 8 performance with that of Windows 7 running on the same machine."

There are actually two kind of performances, which are both important. The real, actual performance, and how well the OS can make the system feel even under load. It's important to have a snappy feel even if the system underneath is working hard, and this is especially true now that the amount of cores in CPUs and multithreading are increasing. Say what you want, but just the feel of speediness is an important factor. This is why the boot up time is looked at so much too - it's great to quickly get to the desktop, and let the OS load up while you're already started working.

One thing I've noticed with boot up times (and this applies to all operating systems) is that the OS tries to load all programs at once. Usually the limiting factor to this will be hard drive. It's less true with SSD drives, but it's really noticeable with 7200 RPM and slower drives. It usually leads to the whole system crawling for a few minutes after desktop shows up. It would be great if the OS would measure the different loads and UI response times, and actually limit the startup programs. This way you could open your browser and other tools and those would be given priority upon startup process.

I tested the developer preview version briefly and it sure seemed a lot faster and snappier. The startup time is remarkably faster. And according to this PCMag test, seems like the overall speed has been improved a lot too. Good job MS!

IMHO the time to desktop means nothing, especially on Windows as you note, the system isn't usable for minutes after the desktop's shown up. Adding in a faster drive (eg, an SSD or a hybrid drive) will cut down on the startup time, but the issue remains. So whether you load everything before showing the desktop or after will only make a difference in perceived bootup time, not in actual "time until the system is actually usable". In other words, it's just a cheap way to appear to boot faster without any actual benefit to the user.

This, ten times over. When I swapped from XP to 7, first thing I noticed how fast it went from pressing the power button to seeing the desktop. Second was to notice that said desktop was completely useless for several minutes after becoming visible, and about 30 seconds after all applications have started. 7's caching is utterly retarded in this regard.

XP was slower to boot to desktop, much faster to get desktop functional and applications started, and most importantly it was HONEST about it. It didn't pret

What happened between 7 an XP was Intel giving MicroSoft a kick by donating a bunch of code to Linux that massively improved the boot times leaving MS to suddenly be far behind in that department.

It's not he first time I've seen Intel do this and Microsoft reacts the same way every time and suspect that's Intel's new way of dealing with MicroSoft: Anytime they want MS to do something they give the code to Linux that does what they want in Linux.

I have to agree that this fascination with boot/shutdown time is like some new made up metric. "My machine can boot in 32 seconds." "HA! Mine can boot in 30!" Shut the fuck up. It takes 2 seconds to sneeze, for Chupacabra's sake! And unless you're rebooting, who cares what the shutdown time is? In which case, call it "reboot time." In which case, talk about how often you have to reboot.

"Long story short: unless the code takes a turn for the worse in the next year or so, we can look forward to some s

When you are forced to wait a few minutes before a computer is really ready to be used from the time you turn it on, then yes, the time it takes IS important. Those who get to the desktop but are still forced to wait before doing anything due to the machine still loading tons of garbage want to see an improvement there. I know that between the HP software for my printer and anti-virus, those take a bit of extra time before they are finished loading before my system is properly responsive, and THAT is wh

The problem there is that with Linux, you can do a custom install that does not install anything you don't want to be running. Anti-virus on Linux? Nope, and many other things under Linux are also tuned to not start until you actually try to run them. With Debian, yes, you can get to a command line very very quickly, but once you fire up X11(whichever flavor you want), that adds a fair bit to the load time. If you set up for the system to come up with the GUI, your OS load time WILL increase.

Startup time, until login screen, or desktop, or usable system, or fully usable system....?

The four are different and most people assume you mean the last, when most are measured to the first.......and unless you have a laptop why are you turning the machine on and off enough to worry about boot times (in the real world the difference between 20s and 1 minutes is a vast gulf, the difference between 1 minute and 5 minutes is irrelevant)

So.. you mean it was in suspend and woke up tongue X screen in 8 seconds? My laptop does that faster. Unless you meant it was completely powered down, nothing store in RAM, etc and you pushed the power on button (which may double as an enter key, I have no clue)

Even with a laptop, I mostly use hibernate. Amount of time to come out of hibernate, even on Windows 7 is only about 20 seconds after BIOS. And that gives you fully usable system, with all the programs you had open previously. Reboot time is absolutely worthless, because I almost never reboot anymore. Once every couple of weeks for updates.

Why can't all software do as many of the current web browsers do and remember their state so they can come back up exactly where they were if they are suddenly or even gracefully shut down?

Indeed. There should be some kind of operating system service which could automatically restart any application which were running when the system was shut down. Perhaps it could even interact with them and restore their state such as documents and cursor positions? Oh wait: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373524(VS.85).aspx [microsoft.com]

The restart manager - if used by the application or service - will actually keep track of files which have been scheduled for updating (new version) during restart. If the file

I'm running a board with UEFI and I couldn't agree more. I have about 20 seconds from press the power switch til I see the Windows 7 start screen. Which then shows the desktop and is usable in about 14 or so seconds thanks to the SSD.

One thing I did notice is that my older laptop I have for work has a BIOS that only take around 3-4 seconds. Now I understand that laptops have set hardware so they don't need to do a lot of checks to load other things, but isn't UEFI supposed to be modular? Why not allow a

You often hear in the software industry that performance optimization is one of the last steps in the software development process. That bodes well for Windows 8, considering at the early stage of Developer Previewâ"even before we've seen an actual betaâ"the nascent operating system is getting widespread praise for its performance

Not necessarily. It wouldn't be the first time things have been performance tuned before they're actually working properly.

you mean like needing the current version of Windows in the same ball park as the competition as far as hardware goes? You don't think this has anything to do with the Apple iPad, Android tablets and various Linux based ARM devices do you? Microsoft can't pull Windows XP out of retirement yet again and also require extra hardware too and consider themselves competitive.

...you boot the bastard on a desktop machine, and then it goes to that horrid Metro screen which makes navigating with a mouse and keyboard painful? It may be fine for touch, but without touch, man....it makes you want to break things.

Then you talk to a Microsoft turfer, as seen on here and other places, they will bald-faced lie to you and say "well, it's not finished yet, who knows what it will be like?"

Then you go to the Microsoft fora and ask Microsoft employees about Metro as being standard for the upcoming desktop, they double-down on it.

Guys, get your friggin' stories straight. All I know for sure is that Metro without touch is a steaming load of bovine excrement backlit by the morning sun so you can see the vapors wafting off it. Fix it.

What are you using the Metro interface for? The only part of it I see is the Start menu, for the fraction of a second it takes me to type the first few letters of the program name I want and hit Enter. The rest, especially the browser, is un-needed. Just use the desktop (including desktop browser) like you always have, and the Start menu like you have (or should have) been since Vista - as a search interface, nothing more.

I'll grant you the current version of Metro is crappy with a mouse. Given that there a

What are you using the Metro interface for? The only part of it I see is the Start menu, for the fraction of a second it takes me to type the first few letters of the program name I want and hit Enter

Remember all the MS Fanboys that argued the Linux is completely broken because you sometimes have to type things in? There used to be hundreds of them here so I'm sure one will read this. What do you have to say now?

It certainly sounds like a big improvement to me anyway instead of navigating through a const

The problem is not exactly the need to type things on Linux... Is more the need to type obscure commands with ever more obscure options to do things that you may can do in a more easy way using a GUI. And in this example remember that:

1) The average user is not an expert. He just wants to use the computer to do his job and does not want (or are unable to) memorize every single existent Unix command (and their options) to do so. And worst, many MAN pages are sloppy on important details.

I know that, you know that, but there's a frequent but deluded insistance that linux is broken the second that a key has to be pressed. Remembering a twisty maze of menu options is sometimes just a tricky as remembering a command, it's just different. When MS Windows users encounter a problem you often cannot tell them how to resolve it - you have to show them how to navigate the twisty maze. Sometimes you'll have to show them a few times while the same people would only need to be told the name of a com

No, if you think Windows 8 is only about a new UI, then you have not read very much about Windows 8. It sounds like Windows 8 is a solid attempt to fix the primary flaw with Windows, and that is this obsession with loading up a ton of services and garbage that you as a user and the apps you run will ever need.

Look at the services list under XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Look at how many are running all the time. Do you know if all of the running services are actually needed, based on what you run and d

Look at the services list under XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Look at how many are running all the time. Do you know if all of the running services are actually needed, based on what you run and do with your computer? Hell, even things like Remote Registry may be turned on, and for no good reason. So, if Windows 8 has a focus to cut down on things running that are not actually needed at that time, it is a big improvement.

Uh, if that's the case, they could have just given everyone Windows For Legacy PCs which is

surely we should bne thinking about time to be usuable once logged in? We all know Windows doesn't start alot of things till after user login (first used in NT4), so this is what we should be measuring, not how quick it gets to login screen. Reading the article they COULD be using this test but it's not clear.

Also things like with WIndows you NEED some sort of anti-virus installed as well so again not that real world, but looking encouraging and we'll see how many of the extra features not yet implemented i

The missus chuckles any time she sees the "startup laptop during skydive" commercial as she has the laptop in question running the OS in question and it doesn't behave anything like the one in the commercial. It's a fairly new machine that's not modified too heavily from it's stock configuration.

+...this is just like "minimum system requirements".

There are probably a lot of details left out, a lot of overly optimistic assumptions made and it's probably not a stock configuration as you're going to see it fro

You often hear in the software industry that performance optimization is one of the last steps in the software development process.

No you don't, not among sane people. You don't do performance optimization as "one of the last steps" shortly before shipping.

What you hear is that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" (quoting Donald Knuth). What he meant is that you should not bother with complicated performance optimizations when designing the code. Rather, create and implement a good clean design, then test performance and optimize where needed. On the other hand, algorithm choice is one of the biggest performance contributors and initial choices will often be made quite early, so one cannot apply this quote blindly. Read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization [wikipedia.org]

You often hear in the software industry that performance optimization is one of the last steps in the software development process.

No you don't, not among sane people. You don't do performance optimization as "one of the last steps" shortly before shipping.

I suspect that the misunderstanding comes from the fact that Microsoft releases checked builds initially, with lots of debugging code some compiler optimizations disabled. So the perception is that they don't "optimize" the code until the final release.

Ideally, a modern desktop OS should be booted once. The rest of the time it should be slipping in and out of sleep.

I know anecdotal evidence is frowned upon here, but my laptop with 4GB of ram and a 5400rpm disk takes about the same time to wake from hibernation as to boot*. Pair that with KDE's ability to restore sessions after a shutdown**, there is almost no advantage in putting it to sleep. I do suspend frequently, but that's more of a short-term solution with battery being used and lights blinking. And I can't sleep next to a running computer, I like silence in my room.

And in the UK its not cheap so yes, I shut my desktop down when I'm not using it and fully switch off the monitor. Aside from that it has an enviromental benefit downstream at the power station. Sleep mode might not use much power but it still uses some and with all the computers in the world that probably adds up to a lot of CO2 for nothing.

"Ideally, a modern desktop OS should be booted once."What! And remove another dick-measurement metric from the field. You blasphemer! And other stuff.

"I can't help but think that people who marvel at improved boot times are rebooting their machines too much."Yeppers, I said that somewhere else in this thread. (You beat me too it, though. You win boot-posting death match! [yes, I'm just joking around] )

They might have notebooks. I have a macbook and an asus g series for windows stuff (translation: gaming).

I don't travel much with the asus so it tends to sit plugged in and go in and out of hibernation. The macbook, I carry around a lot. When i do, i shut it down.

Just shutting the lid and letting it sleep still draws enough power that the battery is somewhat depleted later that day. I don't tune it to start up fast*, but a speedy boot is desirable and one of the reasons i have a macbook and not a very p

This assumes the user is running software without memory leaks. You want to play some games on your computer(something most Mac and Linux users just don't do), you have to expect memory leaks, and the idea of sleep/hibernation to let the machine run for months at a time without a full shutdown/restart just doesn't work. I've run Linux setups where I would run them six months or more between reboots, but the software for Linux generally doesn't have the memory leaks you see under Windows.

This assumes the user is running software without memory leaks. You want to play some games on your computer(something most Mac and Linux users just don't do), you have to expect memory leaks, and the idea of sleep/hibernation to let the machine run for months at a time without a full shutdown/restart just doesn't work.

I will admit that there are ways that system resources can be consumed and leaked, but in general it is hard for a user mode process to leak anything past process termination. Microsoft took that lesson to heart starting back in Win 95, and the system is very aggressive about keeping track of what process allocated what, and cleaning it all up when the process terminates. I play a lot of games, and and I can't think of the last time I had to do a reboot to address something like memory allocation or file

Try playing a modern game for six hours straight and doing that daily without doing a reboot. Windows 7 will let me go a week or more, which is better than the 3-4 days of Vista, and the 1-2 days under XP, but it is still needed.

Since all the games I want to play crash wine and only run on Windows, I have to reboot whenever I want some entertainment. I don't expect companies to start developing Linux games anytime soon, seeing how the driver situation is, so I expect to continue rebooting frequently for a long time yet.

Just wait to install updates, service packs,.NET frameworks (or their future equivalent), etc, etc... A fresh XP installation books in less than 20 seconds on my machine, more like 15. Install updates, drivers,.NET frameworks...

And it's nearly 2 minutes on my, relatively lean, machine (nothing in startup), with decent modern hardware (Intel 9550 Quado Core CPU, 4 GB RAM, 10K RPM hard disk). That's all the way past the login process until I can USE the machine. This thing should fly.
Ubuntu loads in 30 seconds, fully ready to be used.

Actually if you want to know what is generally the cause of Windows being slow its all that OEM trialware crapola that gets loaded onto a machine before you ever get it. I consider the new Asus EEE I got pretty light in that it only had nine extra things running at startup, of which only two I found useful (hybrid engine and Asus Hotkey) whereas I've seen as many as nineteen on some dells and HPs. That is why PC Decrapifier [pcdecrapifier.com] is a handy tool to have around.

The second thing that slows Windows down is what I call "granny services" which thankfully MSFT is FINALLY fixing in Windows 8. granny services are the services that MSFT or the OEMs have running to keep granny from calling tech support. That's support for cameras and scanners,media sharing services, etc. It took them a fricking decade but they are finally gonna have services launch by trigger instead of the usual auto/manual crap.

I only hope the new services setting is backported to Windows 7 as many of us have settled into Windows 7 and won't be making the switch for quite awhile. I know in my case i've just finished getting the last of my customers moved off of XP and I doubt seriously any of them will be too keen on jumping onto a new OS next year. With Windows 7 being supported until 2020 it could become the new XP, which while i'm sure that wouldn't make MSFT none too happy without a killer app to make all these multicores obsolete I just don't see folks switching every couple of years like we did in the 90s. Back then thanks to the MHz wars it was worth your while to switch thanks to the huge increases in performance, but now? Frankly any dual core is "good enough" for the majority of the things your average Joe is doing with a PC.

So while I'm happy that MSFT is FINALLY listening to users and making speed a priority I have a feeling windows 8 adoption will be even slower than 7 was. Anybody who has gotten a new PC in the past 4 years frankly has more than enough power to do whatever they want. Why would they switch? Frankly if the best reason they have is Metro and a few speed increases they are gonna be looking at some slow adoption rates IMHO. For most of the new machines I've seen in the end its the HDD not the OS that ends up the bottleneck anyway.

OF COURSE the test build of Windows 8 runs wickedly quick. Can't you read? It's an early Developer Preview, it's not even a beta yet. They haven't packed it full of the standard train-load of unnecessary services, buggy features, assorted DRM layers, and other miscellaneous bling, crapware, and patented Microsoft Goodness. And by god when it ships, it better have touch-screen enabled by defaultâ¦

I want to mod this insightful, but I haven't played with the preview yet to know if it's actually accurate or not.

Well, it's not so straightforward with 7 (2008 and Vista too). Yes, desktop performance & experience is great, but the abomination that WinSxS folder is fucks it up rather ruthlessly for VM, laptop and SSD usage. As it is, there is no way to strip it down to bare minimum and run lightweight.

I have VMs running XP on 2 gigs of disk and 256mb of RAM. Let me see you do that with any of the above mentioned. And don't tell me disk is cheap, because those VMs number in tens for me, and probably hundreds for ot

Maybe. But my problems with Windows are:
* It's expensive;
* Restrictive license;
* Most apps/add-ons/etc. out there want to sneak in and leave their genes in the OS, which inevitably over time leads to pain-in-the-ass bloat;
* Difficult to find simple apps that just does the job with no questions asked, and no strings attached (whatever I need I found it in Ubuntu Software Center, while I had to search for quite a while to simply find a clingy PDF shuffler once on Windows, for which I paid a $10 or someth

My experience is quite the opposite, when transferring large files from windows to Linux (over a gigabit link) or vice versa it's always the Windows machine that chokes on the IO trashing like a madman (seen with, Debian/Gentoo and Windows XP/Vista/7 with either ReiserFS/ext3/ext4 vs NTFS).

My guess is your distribution isn't set up properly for your workload.

I've been running the developer preview in a VM for about two months now, more or less around the clock with 5-6 mainstream apps (steam, chrome, VLC, mumble) installed for a sort of web service I'm testing. I've been more than happy with it and even exclaimed once or twice to my buddies that I might even consider buying this version of windows before SP1 comes out. Win8 on a VM (Virtual Box, in my case) just screams for basic apps. Even in a VM, Win8 developers figured out how to include "the snappy" in thi

As a desktop user, I don't give a damn how long the system takes to boot as the only time it now shuts down is for Win Updates. Guess the fact that the last boot took 2 minutes makes me a retard, yet I normally have a working system in less then 5 seconds from STR mode (suspend to ram). Networking does take a few seconds longer as it has to aquire an IP but I can be back to playing an offline game, using Office, reading email and such by the time I sit down in my chair after moving the mouse.

Provided that Windows can/may download updates during the active session (when the user is actually using his computer),
how come actual updates take so long, while the OS is in mono-task mode, pending for a complete halt, with no user operation in the way?

It spends a lot of its time doing transactions to make sure it can roll-back any changes in the case of failure. Also, being changes to system files, you have to serially modify/patch because you don't want to chance a race condition and fubar the system files.

I suspect that it is all the redundant code used in Windows, where the same fix has to be applied in 20,000 places across the OS. You also have the insane complexity of the registry, and that is where the problems come from when it comes to updates. I suspect that Microsoft does not use a lot of shared library calls, and there is a lack of anyone looking over the code to see where multiple functions could be consolidated down into a single function.

If it is a desktop, just walk away. If it is a laptop, your battery should last long enough to do the update, so you can just take it with you. What I REALLY hate is going for coffee while waiting for a logon screen, and then you have to wait 2 minutes AGAIN before it becomes stable. Why can't it preload all the important files if it becomes idle while waiting for a logon?

What if your computer is plugged into a UPS, and you are using the power button on the UPS to turn off a lot of other stuff (monitor, DSL modem, router, etc.)? You can't shut the UPS off until the computer is shut down, and the computer won't shut down until it is in the mood.

My personal experince is that Windows is fragile during updates. YMMV, but I have learned the hard way not to fuck with Windows updating itself or shutting it off while it's doing something "important." Many other people have been conditioned over the years by the exact same things.

I don't care if you say the beach is safe to surf, Kilgore. I don't trust you and nor do I trust Windows.

On the other hand, your Linux computer will probably be fucked if you turn it off in the middle of an important update.

Try: sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a

At least that's always worked for me when I need it to, should power fail, etc. Not to mention ext3/ext4 journaling seems much nicer than using NTFS and having to fallback to CHKDSK when such issues arise, (along with the occasional pre-emptive NTFS defrag).

Personally I find the overall cost of Windows as being too costly to use in my business.

Thanks for posting from a parallel universe. Could you please upload that magical version of the software you are using somewhere where the guys from Redmond can find it? Thanks.In return we can send you versions of unix from the 1980s onward that can stop and start just about anything at any time. Our version of Microsoft even had a quite decent version called Xenix that could do that sort of thing.

We are almost to the point where quad-core will be in every laptop and desktop machine sold. With those AMD A6 and A8 based machines selling for in the $500-$700 range, how long do you think it will take before quad-core is in the $400 machines? The bulk of OS sales come from new system purchases, and it takes something really good to see a significant number of people willing to spend $100+ on an OS for their older computer.